Saturday 12 July 2014 14.30 EDT
First published on Saturday 12 July 2014 14.30 EDT

I've never understood why many of my fellow Scots insist on wearing kilts to social gatherings. It seems few weddings and even fewer formal get-togethers occur these days where a majority of the males are not trussed up in the tartan menace, having been sold the lie that it makes them look more manly. It doesn't – it simply makes them look like big liquorice allsorts.

The modern kilt is a fey and ridiculous representation of the robust Highland dress in which the Jacobites went into battle against the Hanoverians and which was banned under the terms of the Dress Act in 1746. Sadly, when that law was repealed a few decades later, tartan was adopted as Scotland's national dress and any sense of quality control, taste or discrimination disappeared.

Any and all types of unnatural and gaudy colourings, dyes and pigmentations were now permitted in the making of the cloth and spurious connections to the ancient clans were invented. This scurrilous practice has been allowed to continue and now no public occasion or event in Scotland is deemed to be complete without its own official tartan. Those who manufacture these garments cash in and charge outrageous prices just so that you can look like the male version of the sugar plum fairy. Tartan does have one good thing going for it, I'll admit: you can be sick all over it and no one would notice. It is scrote couture.

It's puzzling then that there has been such a negative reaction to Jilli Blackwood's creations for Scotland's Commonwealth Games athletes when they're parading in the opening and closing ceremonies. Ms Blackwood is one of Scotland's most gifted and iconoclastic artists whose work with fabric and texture results in the most splendid tapestries, several of which reside happily in our national collections. Unfortunately, Ms Blackwood opted for the tartan route when asked to design our athletes' parade uniforms, thus ensuring from the outset that any sense of decorum careers right out the window.

I wouldn't be surprised if it emerged that the estimable Ms Blackwood had been told to remain within strict parameters when designing the Commonwealth habiliment: we don't care what you concoct as long as it's tartan. What has emerged is a brave attempt to make tartan work as an ensemble. Instead of simply opting for one of those dreadful ghillie shirts that rugby chaps and private school types are fond of wearing with their kilts, Ms Blackwood has tried to bring something different to the party. Thus the shirts have a wee motif kind of thing running through them that seeks to have a relationship with the tartan in the kilts. And the tartan itself is a mercifully understated number that won't glow in the dark.

When Glasgow's Commonwealth Games finally begin on 23 July, the event will become the property of the people and the athletes and not a moment too soon. Until now, the event has belonged to the officials and organisers and what a mess they have made of it so far. Events such as this seem to attract a specific strain of humanity: that which is happiest in a uniform, a name badge and making life as difficult as possible for those they are paid to serve. The controversy over the parade uniform is the least of it.

These people seriously thought it desirable to blow up some of the city's unlovely but iconic high-rise flats as the centrepiece of the opening ceremony. That's right: showcase to the world the expertise of Glasgow local government in keeping its least affluent citizens in permanent drudgery. Then, despite having had years to prepare for the day, their bizarre ticket-issuing policy led to an online meltdown.

Driving through one of Glasgow's edgier neighbourhoods the other day, I encountered evidence of perhaps the most crass and ill-judged action of the Games organisers: the decision to accept Atos as one of the main partners for Glasgow 2014.

Atos is the outsourcing conglomeration whose fit-for-work tests on behalf of the Tory-led Westminster administration would have been deemed to be unrealistic by the Spartans. But when a private firm has been entrusted with cutting benefits costs as part of the government's blame-the-poor austerity drive nothing, it seems, is deemed too harsh. Reports in Glasgow's East End of sclerotic, one-legged pensioners being asked to prove their disability by running round an athletics track are not uncommon. To witness Glasgow 2014 banners bearing the hated Atos logo hanging from lampposts in these streets is simply an insult to residents who have been treated so inhumanely by this shower of government-appointed bovver boys.

Perhaps when the true extent of the emergency funding of Glasgow 2014 is revealed afterwards we will also get the chance to ask the organisers to justify this decision. In the meantime, many residents of Glasgow's East End have already begun to experience the dubious legacy of the Commonwealth Games. Some of them the other week were ordered, with an hour's notice, to remove their cars from their own streets. Those failing to comply with this intrusion would risk having their cars impounded until September, they were told.

Parking restrictions in other parts of the city close to Games venues have also been imposed in a similar high-handed and authoritarian manner. And of course any local traders seeking financial recompense for lost custom during the Games by using the Glasgow 2014 logo in any promotional ventures risk being apprehended and roughed up by the Commonwealth Games Stasi.

Ever since London won the right to host the Olympics in 2012, the word legacy has been deployed to justify excessive cost or corporate gerrymandering of the best seats. At Glasgow 2014, "legacy" is placed in every whispered conversation about the Games. The suggestion is that the magic of the event will have the city's most under-privileged neighbourhoods teeming with Alf Tuppers all eating their five a week and tipping their cloth caps to the foreman for letting them off early from their shift at the foundry so that they can compete for the local Harriers. And that the nice smart homes in the athletes' village will be turned into affordable housing for the poor and the low-paid.